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We usually describe the smell [of blood] as "metallic" because it's similar to the smell left on our fingers when we handle coins, or in the air when we scrub a bare metal pan or sink. ... Our hominid ancestors would have known that molecule [epoxy decenal] and smell long before they paid much attention to rocks and ores, so for much of our prehistory, they may well have experienced metals as bloody-smelling.

— Nose Dive by Harold McGee (Page 502 - 503)

“You have to be careful in the city,” she says. “They have laws against sodomy.” “If they do, they don’t enforce them,” Fetter says. “I see a lot of people together—“ “That’s not how laws work, son,” she says. “A visible law is a ploy, a little play. A mummery in waiting, waiting for you to become interesting. Never give them a reason to care who you are.”

— The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera (Page 65)

The louse shares with us the misfortune of being prey to the typhus virus. If lice can dread, the nightmare of their lives is the fear of someday inhabiting an infected rat or human being. For the host may survive but the ill-starred louse that sticks his haustellum through an infected skin and imbibes the loathsome virus with his nourishment is doomed beyond sucker. In 8 days he sickens, in 10 days he is in extremis, on the 11th or 12th day his tiny body turns red with blood extravasated from his bowel and he gives up his little ghost. Man is too prone to look upon all nature through egocentric eyes, to the louse we are the dreaded emissaries of death. He leads a relatively harmless life, the result of centuries of adaptations. Then out of the blue an epidemic occurs, his host sickens and the only world he has ever known becomes pestilential and deadly. And if as a result of circumstances not under his control his stricken body is transferred to another host whom he in turn infects, he does so without guile from the uncontrollable need for nourishment, with death already in his own entrails. If only for his fellowship with us in suffering, he should command a degree of sympathetic consideration.

— Rats, Lice and History by Hans Zinsser